Transient errors, triggered by alpha particles or cosmic radiation, are an increasing problem for integrated circuits. Due to declining structure widths, decreasing voltages and higher clock frequencies, there is an increased probability that a voltage spike, caused by an alpha particle or by cosmic radiation, will falsify a logical value in an integrated circuit. The effect can be a false calculation result. In safety-related systems, such errors must therefore be detected reliably.
In safety-related systems, such as an ABS control system in a motor vehicle, in which malfunctions of the electronic equipment must be detected with certainty, redundancies are normally provided for error detection, particularly in the corresponding control devices of such systems. Thus, for example, in known ABS systems, the complete microcontroller is duplicated in each instance, all ABS functions being calculated redundantly and checked for consistency. If a discrepancy appears in the results, the ABS system is switched off.
Such processor units having at least two integrated execution units are also known as dual-core architectures or multi-core architectures. The different execution units (cores) execute the same program segment redundantly and in a clock-synchronized manner; the results of the two execution units are compared, and an error will then be detected in the comparison for consistency.